Today’s podcast is a three-parter and features interviews with Zig Serafin, Brad Anderson and Isabelle Zdatny that I conducted at Qualtrics’ recent X4 2025: The Experience Management Summit, which took place in Salt Lake City on March 18th-20th. Zig Serafin is the Chief Executive Officer of Qualtrics, Brad Anderson is the President of Products, UX and Engineering at Qualtrics, and Isabelle Zdatny is the Head of Thought Leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute. We talk about all of the latest developments at Qualtrics, including some of the big product announcements, many of the big challenges currently facing brands and a new piece of research that Qualtrics recently produced in collaboration with McKinsey on The AI-Powered Customer Experience Opportunity.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – Testing and experimentation is everyone’s problem – Interview with Shafqat Islam of Optimizely – and is number 535 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders who are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: Today’s episode is sponsored by Qualtrics, who recently held their X4 2025: The Experience Management Summit in Salt Lake City on March 18th-20th. I was there, and it was a great event that explored how leading organizations are leveraging Experience Management (XM) to enhance customer and employee satisfaction, reduce operating costs, and achieve remarkable breakthroughs. We heard from industry leaders and companies, including Autodesk, Ford, USAA and Hilton. Find out more and catch up on the latest news coming out of the event at the Qualtrics website.

Here are the highlights of my chat with Zig, Brad and Isabelle:

Zig’s highlights:

• Up until this point, the Qualtrics platform has been used to diagnose and create powerful insights that help companies know which direction to go in the market. Insights that help companies know what to do with their customers in moments that matter the most.
• Now, using agentic AI, we are able to make every connection count by taking action on that deep insight via our newly announced Experience agents.
• Experience agents are like having the best company representative, the best leader of your company, show up in the moments that matter the most in order to be able to close the loop, whether that is with customers or employees.
• In terms of what the future looks like, I think we will see organisations become more proactive and start to anticipate more. However, to do that well, you have to do a really good job of listening.
• Rick Rubin talks about this idea of intense listening, which is purely listening with the intention to properly understand.
• If we as human beings want to listen to only what we want to hear, we’re usually not going to get to the outcome that we’re looking for.
• Part of designing experiences means that you have to be able to ground yourself, take a moment and pause, reflect, really listen and really tune in.
• That’s really hard in the fast-paced world. But if you’re an experience leader, your job has to start with that and how well you are really tuning in to why things are happening the way they are and why people feel the way that they do right now.
• This is the art and the science of listening. It’s the core of Qualtrics.
• AI can actually make business more human over time if you are taking advantage of the opportunity to say how do I create this freedom to tune in more.
• Zig’s best advice: One, make sure you’re very clear about what the values of your company are. And, if you want to be customer-oriented, make sure that you’re operating your company from an outside-in perspective. Two, be in a position where you develop a complete understanding of the customer by no longer allowing your data to sit in silos.

Brad’s highlights:

• We’ve been doing extensive work in AI for many, many years. But what we believe is that in 2021, we really unlocked what I would describe as the ability to listen at scale.
• Last year, we processed over three billion survey responses and phone calls that our customers sent us, which is up 40% over the previous year.
• There three things that I would call out with regards to our core product innovations that we’re announcing:
  • The first is we are essentially agentifying, for lack of a better term, the scenarios that customers already use us for.
  • The second thing is helping organizations to have listening systems on all channels.
  • The third thing is that using AI, we now have fundamentally changed how research is done through synthetic panels.
• In any given year, we process more than a billion survey responses. The average survey has 14 questions, so we process somewhere between 15 and 20 billion survey questions that humans answer on our platform every single year.
• We do more than 10,000 research projects per year, in addition to what our customers are doing in the CX world and the EX world.
• What we are able to do with that data is anonymize it, aggregate it and use it to train our AI. And that is the unique data set that we have, and nobody else on the planet has.
• What we’ve now been able to do with that research is create synthetic profiles such that an individual can now say, “I would like to understand how a community is going to react to packaging, pricing, branding etc”. Instead of that taking days to weeks, it’s now available in minutes because our AI has been trained on all of that data to respond as a human might.
• I don’t think the synthetic panel is gonna replace humans, but I think you’re gonna see a hybrid approach. Our research is telling us that 60% of research in three to four years will be synthetic, but you’re gonna have the ability to say I wanna have a full human, a full synthetic, or a hybrid approach, and they’ll all work together on our platform.
• We’ve now also agentified our surveys so that every single time a customer presses submit there’s an answer. Our agentic AI can then assess the response and intervene and take action if the response feels partial, for example.
• One of the things that we track religiously is what’s the completion rate that our customers are getting on surveys, and we do a lot of the experimentation to help organizations, one, increase the completion rate because then that’s creating more data coming in. But, more importantly, how can we improve the quality of the data.
• When customers are using our conversational feedback, which is based on generative AI, the completion rate of survey completion is seven points higher than the worldwide average.
• For context, the average response rate is sub-10 %, with some organizations operating with a completion rate of 3 or 4%, while there are some that are up in the 20s.
• We are also applying a set of lexiconical rules that we look at and use to help us understand the quality of the response and that is leading to a doubling of the quality of the response that comes back.
• So, we are doubling the actionable feedback that comes back.
• We also just announced a partnership with Langchain, who are building a platform that I think is gonna be one of the most commonly used platforms that agents will be built on. Our agents are being built on top of some of their platform.
• We are also working with Langchain to define a common language, a standardized language on how agents will communicate with each other.
• Brad’s best advice: I’m a big believer in humans and organizations learn by doing. So, every organization should have some kind of a KPI or some kind of a measurement of how all of their people using AI.

Isabelle’s highlights:

• In the research that we collaborated with McKinsey on, we found is that while most organizations do broadly recognize that AI is going to be transformational, they are not yet clear on the exact business results that it is going to create for their organization.
• As a result, a lot of them are hesitant to do the systematic approach to implementation that’s ultimately going to be necessary to really unlock value from these technologies.
• 77 % of executives said that they consider CX to be either a significant or critical priority for their organization.
• 72 % of them expect AI to fundamentally transform customer experience within the next three years.
• But interestingly, only 15 % of executives were aspiring to be at the forefront of this AI-driven business transformation.
• There’s hesitance because AI comes with some serious risks. If you don’t proceed responsibly, you can end up causing some real damage to your brand.
• The reality here, though, is that AI creates compounding advantages for the organizations that get it right and implement it.
• While 89 % of companies say that they have some AI initiatives underway, only 12 % say that they have a centralized AI strategy in place with coordinated ownership and centralized kind of purview over the entire implementation.
• We also found that when organizations do take that systematic approach, they are 2.4 times more likely to report market share gains compared to their other competitors.
• We are seeing what we call pilot purgatory where brands are basically running a lot of siloed experiments but they’re not scaling those across the organization, which is just going to limit the value.
• Ethan Malik, who’s an AI researcher and Wharton professor, describes a situation that he calls the “jagged frontier of AI,” where it’s actually really good at some things, but then continues to be really bad at others. But, if you’re not using it in your everyday life, you don’t know what it’s good at and what it’s bad at and how it’s going to help you and where you need to be cautious and where it’s likely to hallucinate.
• Even the employees who are using AI poorly are still doing better than the ones who aren’t using it at all.
• McKinsey found through their analysis that there is an estimated $860 billion in value across industries that could be achieved through the use of AI. And that number could go all the way up to $1.3 trillion. And it’s coming from three different areas.
• About half of it, 420 billion is expected to come from productivity gains, 260 billion is expected to come from revenue growth and then 180 billion will come from process improvement.
• While the value potential exists across all industries, the exact specific opportunity, the nature and scale of it differs by different sectors. But, we found that the biggest gains are likely to be seen in business and professional services, in retail, and then in both B2B and B2C financial services, like SMB banking, retail banking, and commercial insurance.
• Start with the end in mind. Start with what are the outcomes you’re trying to achieve, what are the business metrics you’re trying to move, what do you want experiences to look like, what’s on your roadmap that you’re implementing and then figure out how could you incorporate AI to help you accomplish those goals more efficiently and economically rather than just implementing AI for the sake of AI or because your executives told you to.
• At the XM Institute we have a maturity model that looks at the maturity of programs and I would say something that’s really hit me, especially at this conference, is I feel like the overall maturity of CX programs has bumped up.

About Zig

Zig Serafin is the Chief Executive Officer of Qualtrics, a role he has held since 2021. Zig has been instrumental in the development and launch of the experience management platform and Qualtrics AI. Zig led the company’s 2021 IPO and its $12.5 billion acquisition by Silver Lake Partners and CPP Investments in 2023. He joined the company as Chief Operating Officer in 2016. Zig sits on the boards of Qualtrics and Moody’s.

Prior to joining Qualtrics, Zig was Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, where he led its multi-billion dollar enterprise collaboration services business that became Microsoft Teams, and the teams that developed Microsoft’s artificial intelligence platform.

Connect with Zig on LinkedIn here.

About Brad

Brad Anderson is President of Products, UX and Engineering, responsible for defining, crafting and supporting the Qualtrics experience management solutions. He leads a team of engineers, product managers, experience designers, program managers, IT professionals and security teams across Qualtrics’ global development centers. He is responsible for ensuring the Qualtrics SaaS service continues to scale and meet all SLAs, privacy and security requirements.

Prior to Qualtrics, he spent more than 17 years as a Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, where he led engineering teams that built several multi-billion dollar businesses serving more than 300 million monthly active users and devices.

Connect with Brad on LinkedIn here.

About Isabelle

Isabelle Zdatny is the Head of Thought Leadership at Qualtrics XM Institute. As Head of Thought Leadership with Qualtrics XM Institute, Isabelle helps Experience Management (XM) professionals make sense of the complex, evolving XM landscape so they can do their jobs with more confidence and success. She produces industry-leading content on XM trends and best practices, develops and delivers training, advises organizations on the design and execution of their CX and EX programs, and speaks on key XM topics and trends.

Connect with Isabelle on LinkedIn here.